A look behind the scenes! Here you see Josh Hubball (VP of BD for Conduit Labs), Michael Dutcher (general manager of Dim Mak) and Nabeel Hyatt (founder / CEO of Conduit). They’re in the offices for Dim Mak. But you could probably guess that by looking at that DJ stand, covered in their distinctive logo. (I like how the low ceiling makes Josh look like a giant. Dude is tall, but he’s not Kobe.)

In preparation for Loudcrowd’s release — you know, beyond beta — Josh and Nabeel traveled to L.A. and San Francisco last week to hang with various music industry/ gaming/ web 2.0 bigwigs. Nabeel writes: “We had a great conversation with Dim Mak about lots of things we can do together, and left fully loaded with T-shirts and CDs.”

What does this mean for you, aside from a reason to be jealous of some people you probably don’t know? It just means there will be a wealth of awesome music for the game from the get-go. And that things will only get awesomer for Loudcrowd from then on. Just you wait! So, now that you know this, you can rest and enjoy the remainder of your President’s Day… Like, you can see what’s on TV during the daytime. Or, that IKEA sale looks pretty awesome! Me? I’m going back to bed.

—DJ Yeti

We’re extremely proud to congratulate one of our newest employees, Seth Sivak, for his work on Winds of Orbis, which was recently awarded as a winner of the Independent Games Festival 2009 Student Showcase. Winds of Orbis features ground-breaking use of the Nintendo Wii-mote and floor pads to promote more physically active play. See more (including a video of the game in action) here.

We here at Conduit love seeing games that explore new frontiers, so we’re thrilled to have Seth become part of the team as our newest Gameplay Engineer. (Stay tuned to see his newest creations on loudcrowd.com!)

How’s the second game look?

I’m officially very excited about getting all the stuff we’ve been hacking away at out for you guys to start playing with. This past week we invited some of our most passionate private beta users, as well as a handful of folks who have never used the site, to come by the Conduit HQ and give some feedback on the latest set of changes that are about to go live. Or, as we like to call it, the “pizza test.”

One of the first surprises was the extent to which folks who have been playing Loudcrowd a lot have figured out every nuance of the scoring and mechanics, thanks for caring! Then we got down to testing the entirely new site flow that we have been planning to do as soon as we launched our second activity. We took the requisite hits for a few UI inconsistecies and bugs that we have since worked out, but the best news of the evening was the unanimous thumbs up for the next game to hit Loudcrowd. We are pulling a few more late nights than I would like getting this next release out, but I’ve got the suspicion it’s worth it.

We had Governor Deval Patrick in our offices on Friday playing a little Loudcrowd and talking startups. In case this becomes a trend, we’ve decided to start a Facebook group called, “Politicians playing Loudcrowd.” Hey, you never know.

You’ll be happy to hear that the Governor, besides being all buddy buddy with the new President, also does fairly well at dancing for random college kids online.